His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [110]
The ghosted articles reflected how far Frank had fallen by 1952. With his career in tatters, he was willing to do anything to reclaim his stardom, and Ava vowed to stick with him through the climb back even if it jeopardized her own career. To prove it, she went on suspension at Metro to be able to accompany him to Honolulu for a booking. When they returned, the studio lent Ava to Twentieth Century Fox for The Snows of Kilimanjaro. It was based on Hemingway’s short story about a mortally wounded big-game hunter who recalls the story of his life as he lies dying in a camp at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Hemingway had asked that Ava be given the role of Cynthia, the Lost Twenties girl whom the big-game hunter had once loved and who dies during the Spanish Civil War. Ava was thrilled with the role, but Frank said she had to turn it down so she could be with him in New York.
“But it’s the perfect part for me,” she said.
“The perfect part for you is being my wife,” said Frank.
Ava confided her problem to the scriptwriter, Casey Robinson. “She told me that Frank was so low, his career was so hopeless, that he needed her to go with him to New York, where he had a nightclub engagement,” he said. “He insisted on it. It was quite a problem. So I sat down with Henry King [the director], went over the schedule, and changed things around. We had to promise to shoot Ava’s part in ten days. On that promise, Sinatra gave a reluctant okay.
“Came the ninth day of shooting. We had only one more sequence to do. Frank kept calling her on the set and making her life pretty darn miserable. I like Frank now, but at the time I hated the little bastard because he was making my girl unhappy. Now I understand him, he was so beaten and insecure. Then came the last scene, the scene on the battlefield in Spain when Ava is dying. There was a problem: we had a great many extras, four or five hundred in all, and to satisfy the ten-day agreement we’d have to shoot into the night, which would have been horribly expensive. We decided to go over the ten days and break the agreement. When King and I told Ava, all hell broke loose. She became hysterical. She called New York, and Frank was furious with her. God knows how we got through that last day.”
Ava signed autographs as “Ava Sinatra” and took every opportunity to defend her husband to the press. “Frankie’s a great artist and terribly misunderstood, and even if I weren’t married to him, I’d defend him,” she told Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham.
“Yes, I concede he has a quick temper, but if the press, and particularly the photographers, would stop baiting him for the sake of a story or picture, there wouldn’t be so much tension in his relations with the press. It’s mob psychology. One person or writer takes a crack at him, and others pick it up because it seems the thing to do. They know Frank can be needled, so they let him have it.”
Years later, Ava reflected on what was happening to her husband when all he had was fading pride and a frayed voice. His moods swung from childish self-pity and the need to be reassured to a swaggering arrogance of barked orders and commands. She indicated that he resented her stardom and her possession of a much bigger name than his. But she also said they were happiest then because he was dependent on her.
“Yes, Frank was really up against it at that time,” said Ava in 1982. “Unknown to the public, he was having serious problems with his voice, and his agents were having difficulty booking him into the top night spots. It seems hard to believe now, but he was having to play saloons and dates that were way beneath him.”
She accompanied him on every one of these demeaning engagements, including one in Hoboken at the Union Club in September 1952. It was probably the final affront, illustrating how far he had fallen from his days as the bobby-soxers’ idol when, in 1947, Hoboken had proclaimed a Frank Sinatra Day in his honor, presented him with the key to the city, and staged a grand parade led by